


rise without ever falling

by MAVEfm



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Asexuality, Brotherly Affection, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Introspection, Mental Health Issues, Suicidal Thoughts, Touch-Averse Jughead Jones, also Fangs is a touchy sweet boy, guess i gotta make it one, hc that Jughead can't stand being touched except by those he trusts completely, he did join a cult just to get dicked down but ya know a gays gotta do what a gays gotta do, he's also the gay with braincells even though he acts flighty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-31 10:04:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18589009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MAVEfm/pseuds/MAVEfm
Summary: Kurtz pushes them through the window and over the ledge and the few seconds before they hit the ground are a few too many for Jughead, who wonders, not for the first time, if dying would really be all that bad.Half character study, half missing scene. Because I liked this moment.





	rise without ever falling

 

 

Those few seconds suspended in the air hadn’t been the scariest part, Jughead had realized.

 

It was the moments that sandwiched it, the scuffle down the stairs to Kurtz pushing him back. The descent had been peaceful, his ‘ascension’, as it were, was calm, watching the splintered wood cascade down around them as he reached up to the clear night sky.

 

He had screamed, though it had been useless. His voice high and panicked then bit back at the top of his mouth. In his terror, every name he thought he knew left his brain behind, but at the last second, hearing Kurtz laugh and the thin glass break, he might have started to say: _“Dad-!”_

 

He felt the wood splinter behind him and for just a _second_ , his legs caught on the wall.

 

It was like he was riding a rollercoaster.

 

He flashed back to 5th grade, a state fair field trip. The coaster had been called _Certain Death_ and had a loop in the middle. Archie had grabbed his hand and they made a sacred pact that they would ride together.

 

They did, and Jughead remembers feeling millions of miles away from the ground. At the rollercoasters highest peak, his chest had squeezed inward, begging him not to fall. The ground felt miles away, the concrete a blank and welcoming fate below. He’d always been a morbid person, but never about himself, not before imagining his body ruined on the hard ground below. He imagined his impacted skull framed in a pool of his own thick blood and he’d grabbed onto Archie, struggling to breathe. The descent had come, heavy in his lungs and in his throat. Then the loop, then the end. And they were safe.

 

Jughead had felt happy for it too, happy that it was over, but also happy that it had happened. Thoughts of his own dead body forgotten, he’d wanted to do it again.

 

At the back of his mind, the part that was always writing, taking notes, connecting dots, he circled the words: _Metaphor_ , and _Situational Irony_.

 

His book was getting longer than he'd intended. He'd become a main character and now it was costing him.

 

His chest tightened, lungs retracting. He felt tears bite at the corners of his eyes. There was no Archie Andrews to grab this time.

 

Kurtz whooped into the air and the glass shattered, Jughead’s legs caught, but didn’t hold.

 

If anything, the fall was a break. A brief reprieve from it all, all this _bullshit_.

 

Riverdale, as a town, was psychotic, he’d never loved or hated a place more in his life. His shitty, stupid, little, truck stop of a town. But he never thought he’d be a cog in the machine.

 

He had wrapped his arms around Kurtz, as tight as he could, even as Kurtz spread his arms wide like he was expecting to fly, the zip-tie breaking.

 

A moment ago Jughead hated his guts, now he wished Kurtz could be right. Right, in thinking that his impossible, drug-induced, G&G fantasies could come true for just a second. For the ‘ascension’ part to be real.

 

The shattered glass reflected stars.

 

So did his eyes.

 

Kurtz’s long coat unfurled around them.

 

Jughead closed his eyes and imagined his body, the halo of blood, his impacted skull.

 

Truth was, he’d thought a lot about dying.

 

And not just in the usual gang-related violence sort of ways, or the ‘I attend a high school in America’ sort of way, or even in the Riverdale sort of way.

 

He imagined just doing it himself.

 

There were all these stories floating around about how people who survived jumping from bridges realized halfway down that they didn’t actually want to die, and that the solutions to their problems had been staring them in the face this entire time.

 

Jughead really didn’t feel much of anything.

 

No epiphanies for him, he guessed.

 

He was still an idiot teenage boy that ‘wasn’t like other guys’ and by that he meant: Mentally Ill.

 

God, he fucking hated himself sometimes.

 

Once upon a time he'd tried his hand at diagnosing himself, only ending up with some form of mania.

 

It scared him, but in the end why couldn't it be true?

 

He was off his rocker. Like Betty, but not like Betty, because Betty did this thing where she internalized everything. Meanwhile, he just had to tear everything apart, exploding outward just to leave everyone else to pick up the pieces. Or he needed to feed into this compulsive need to find patterns and connect everything to something else, because it _had_ to, right?

 

Paranoid, paranoid, paranoid. Paranoid little Jughead, have a snack, it’ll calm you down.

 

He was so hungry.

 

He went through periods where he believed he was being watched. Through windows, around corners, through the trees. It made his skin itch, his clothes tighter, his hands shake. _They_ watched him. When he was alone, with Archie, with Sweet Pea and Fangs, they glared at him when he was alone, or with Betty, burning holes in his back whenever he touched her.

 

Then the feeling would be gone, in the middle of class, eating dinner with his family, connecting pins on his board. Just, gone. It was sort of like surfacing from underwater, where he would realize that maybe people with normal, functioning brains didn’t think things like that.

 

Maybe people with normal brains went through life without needing to see conspiracies everywhere as well.

 

The Jones family didn’t have the health insurance to ask those sorts of questions.

 

So sometimes Jughead would work himself into a frenzy over nothing or lie around the house in a fugue state, maybe he’d point his switchblade, or say things he didn’t mean. It was nothing his dad couldn’t coax him out of, or Betty, or Archie, or Mr. Andrews, or Fangs, or Veronica, or Pop Tate that one time. It wasn’t like he heard voices, and so long as they just didn’t _touch_ him while it was happening.

 

Jughead simply feared complacency, and recently, his overactive paranoia was turning out to be more and more justified.

 

Which made him want to be touched less and less.

 

He and Kurtz separated in midair, their limbs reaching up, arms spread and legs flailing. His fingers spread wide, like they were ready to catch what was coming, or trying to weave their way into the sky or wrap around the gnarled branches of a barren tree. It was losing its leaves, he was losing his mind, getting ready for winter.

 

He supposes he'd always been weird about touch, even as a kid. Just seven years old and his mom had to ask his permission to hold him in her arms and kiss him on the forehead. Just eight years old and his dad had to be careful with his arms when he taught him how to ride a bike.

 

Other times, he’d be fine, needing to be touched like any other person instead of skittish around reaching hands and fingers. He’d hugged his dad a lot lately, willingly and desperately, pretending not to notice that FP was holding back surprise almost every time.

 

He’d always hugged JB, fixed her hat, straightened her jacket. He loved her so much.

 

It was getting harder to touch his mom.

 

No, not hard.

 

He just didn’t want to anymore, he’d wanted to, back in Toledo, and he did, as much as he could. But now, his skin felt like fire when she got close, and maybe they could come back from this and maybe he could look at her without feeling angry again. But it wouldn’t be like it had been, and it wouldn’t be like it was with dad.

 

Jughead’s openness with being touched had signaled to FP that he could be the football coach he’d always dreamed of being. It was kind of funny, Jughead might have smiled in midair, but FP loved a manly slap on the back like nothing else. He liked grabbing Jughead by the shoulder and shaking him with a smile on his face, or grabbing him around the back of the head whenever he told a bad joke.

 

Jughead never knew his grandfather, but FP must be making up for his mistakes when fatherly and affectionate touches like that had been bastardized by booze and four-letter words.

 

His father could be angry, yell, throw the mid-morning paper and call him _‘Boy!_ ’, but he’d never cross the real line.

 

He hoped FP wouldn’t find his body, that it would be one of the Serpents, like Sweet Pea, or Vivian. If Jughead came back as a ghost, he didn’t want to see his father’s face as it twisted to see his lifeless body. He’d seen the expression just once before, waking up in the hospital after his beat-down by the Ghoulies, his chest aching from stitches and his vision blurry. FP had carried him to the hospital, he’d been told, then slept in his room for two days in his dirty clothes, just waiting for him to wake up.

 

His face had been sunk and low, his eyes red from lack of sleep, sad like an old man’s, but his smile had been full watching Jughead come to.

 

He wouldn’t smile like that after this.

 

He wouldn’t get to joke about the totally cool scars on his chest either, telling him the ladies were into a man with scars. Even as small as they were.

 

Betty had once liked to trace them, running a hand up his shirt in the middle of some rendezvous she’d organized by slipping a note in his back pocket. But it had always ruined the moment, her soft fingers just felt like the knives that had hurt him, and his thing with being touched would return, against his will.

 

Because he loved touching Betty, so much.

 

He liked to run his hands through her hair and let her lean on him against a table, or wrap his arms around her and bury his face in her shoulder. And he knew he loved her, but then she would touch him somewhere that reminded him of that night, like his not-at-all-impressive scars, or the spot where his shoulder still ached and in that second he would feel all the attraction he had for her just drain out of him. His skin felt like fire, and he had to step away, leave her cold.

 

The eyes would come back, watching him, and he knows it's rude to just leave a girl waiting like that. But he thinks he might throw up if he tried to continue, tried to touch her again or even think about sex. He would feel guilty, not because he thought of sex as disgusting, because he’d been thinking that long before he decided having sex with her wasn’t. He’d feel guilty because Betty was supposed to be his personal exception to that, and then there she would be, standing in a dark closet looking beautiful as all hell and waiting for an explanation. It was unfair to her, and he’d spiral because why did she like him so much? Why was she still here?

 

“It’s okay,” She would say, “I mean that, I love you.”

 

“I love you,” He would say back. The spiral would be gone, but the watching eyes would not. He couldn’t kiss her in that moment. He feared he would be sick all over her at the notion, but she would ghost her hand through his hair, and lead him to his next class by curling her pinkie through a belt loop on his jeans because she couldn’t help but be amazing like that.

 

He should have kissed her longer before he went and got himself thrown out a window, just kissed her and kissed her and let her just _touch_ him, difficult relationship with his asexuality be damned.

 

His eyes traced the flow of Kurtz’s hair, flowing free. His hat came loose, becoming its own entity as they fell and letting the cold wind bite at his scalp.

 

He’d picked up a lot of security blankets over the years: His serpent jacket, his beaten up laptop, every flannel he owned, his ruined copy of _The Order of the Phoenix_ , a band tee he’d stolen from Archie forever ago.

 

And this damn hat.

 

He felt naked without it, couldn’t even attend a damn funeral without it, National Anthem be damned. But having it fly off moments before his death was poetic, where he’d lay, broken and fully exposed. Hopefully, they’d bury him in it.

 

If not, he wanted Archie to have it. He decided so right then and there. Archie Andrews, his best friend, most trusted confidant, and occasionally confusing crush. If he could, Jughead would invent time travel just to fix that dumbass’s life. He really deserved a future as a singer/songwriter that got his way into college on a sports scholarship, and instead he’d been through complete and utter hell and won’t even try to retake the ACT.

 

Someone should have punched Geraldine Grundy in the face. _He_ should have punched Geraldine Grundy in the face. Sure Jason Blossom had been murdered, but something primal in him blamed her for all of it. She should have been _punished._ Instead, he let the idiot parents run her out of town instead of, oh he doesn’t know, _put her in jail and on a list of sexual predators?_

 

Archie had gone through _hell_ for Jughead, got _assaulted_ , ran from the mob, went into a paranoid spiral after his father was shot, went to prison for a murder he didn’t commit, and now he would see is best friend _dead_ after all of it. His fucking _brother_ had survived a bear attack only to see him dead because he tripped over a fucking ledge.

 

And _fuck,_ maybe that was his fucking epiphany.

 

He hit the ground and for a second his heart stopped. He was dead, he had to be, because his eyesight was gone, ripped away as a flashing light bounced around his skull. His back arched, twisted in pain and seizing like every nerve in his body was electrified. His arms bent and his fingers spasmed, his body reacting with pins and needles pressed against every muscle and bone.

 

The breath was ripped from his lungs, turning his sobs of pain into gasps of pain, squeaking at the back of his throat. He writhed, begging for air that wouldn’t come. There was a wall in his throat and a tight noose wrapped around his chest that pulled him tight, constricting his lungs and trying to break his ribs. He wanted to scream, squeezing his blind eyes shut and letting tears roll down the sides of his face. Puffs of air escaped him, never meeting his lungs, and beside him, Kurtz coughed, wheezing.

 

He was dead, he _had_ to be dead, his heart had stopped and his body was begging for life, his _legs_ , he couldn’t-

 

In one rattling push, as if claws had reached up from his mouth, air forced its way past the wall and back into his lungs. Once, twice, just tiny gasps that stilled his nerves and shook awareness back into his limbs, _his legs_.

 

Kurtz groaned and Jughead opened his eyes, head spinning with the stars above, glass and wood biting into his back. He couldn’t speak, words coming out as single syllable tones, pressed away to regain the ability to breathe. But he twisted anyway, reaching out with shaking hands and aching fingers. Kurtz echoed him, curling into a ball then pushing himself to his knees, his hair full of splinters and a cut on his face dripping blood down his cheek.

 

Jughead gave a small sob as he reached, grasping at Kurtz’s coat with loose fingers, still numb with shock. They connected, trying to hold, and then thrashed, the ground cold and hard beneath them. Kurtz was crying too, his bravado having melted away in the fall and giving way to the terrified animal underneath, operating on instinct.

 

They scrambled, unable to stand, but they were reaching for each other, not pulling away.

 

Feeling someone solid underneath their shaking hands, breathing unstable, they locked eyes with each other, faces frozen with the same indescribable emotion. They’d shared something awful, Jughead felt disgusting, but maybe it was necessary. Necessary because maybe near death experiences did serve a purpose, making things that were unclear, clear. Notions were no longer notions and had instead blossomed into real and tangible ideas.

 

There was no ascension, there was no moment in which Jughead had felt he had risen, not in any sense. But through his panic there was this new foundation established at the very center of his being, something _solid_. Maybe Kurtz had found it too.

 

They both realized at once that they were _alive_.

 

And his entire body was shouting in pain and fear, his face screwed into an attempt to stop _crying_ -

 

Kurtz forced his escape, sprinting on legs so shaky they were close to snapping in half and a voice so soft and fearful broke through the earthquake in Jughead’s mind, cracking through the anxiety and sheer horror that gripped him. “Jug-” Archie grasped his shoulder with one solid hand, anchoring him to Earth, somehow different from the way he had grabbed for Kurtz. Jughead held Archie’s wrist, finding something to pull his soul back into one piece. “Jug, are you okay?”

 

He didn’t know how to answer that question, but Archie’s voice had an almost ethereal quality to it.

 

He coughed, ironed out his purpose, then shouted: “Kurtz! Don’t-” He retched, fully joined to his body, “Don’t let him get away!”

 

Archie left behind a burst of air that crackled with energy and Jughead struggled to his knees, grabbing his hat but unable to put it on. His fingers too numb to bend.

 

Somehow, he got to his feet, every muscle and tendon in his legs stretching with effort. He wondered if he would even notice if he collapsed, staring at the dark distance where Archie had disappeared.

 

Then he was crying, for real this time, not from fear and shock but from the weight of everything that had happened. As if his body had found the excuse it had been looking for to empty itself of everything it had buried for him, ignoring the pressing of eyes on his back and the way the world was tipping forward as he fell to his knees, leaning back on the heels of his boots.

 

It was Fangs’ voice this time, and his hands on his shoulders. “Hey…”

 

Sweet Pea was a few feet behind, like always.

 

“Hey, come on,” Fangs pressed, “Let’s go, it’s okay…”

 

Jughead would hate to admit he was crying like a baby, but Sweet Pea had stepped forward and pulled him to his feet, positioning him under Fangs’ arm so he could hang his head just so into the leather of his Serpent jacket.

 

“You’re okay,” Fangs rubbed circles into his arm, “We’re going home.”

 

Sweet Pea was beside him, never one to touch, just like Jughead, but he said: “Archie caught Kurtz.”

 

Jughead, still tearful and snotty, nodded. “Thank you- _thank you_ , I-” Fangs tightened his grip around his shoulders.

 

“Yeah, Jug, totally.”

 

His hat was limp in his hands and Jughead felt the same, knowing if Fangs let go he’d simply crash to the ground and never get up again.

 

“Hey man, you’re gonna be fine,” Sweet Pea gave him a quick tap on the shoulder, staying cool, but his voice was tight with concern, “Gargoyles got out fast when we smashed their shit-” He must have exchanged a look with Fangs, because he fell silent.

 

They loaded him onto the trailer of Vivian’s truck, settling him down to rest against the cab so they could sit on either side, rubbing shoulders. They were all shaking, Jughead realized, tense and ready for another fight, another swarm of gargoyles, another fall. Jughead tried to compartmentalize, noting the guns and trying to remember how many rooms had been devoted to cooking drugs, but every step in his head led him to another fall, over and over again, the wood breaking again and again. His breath shook, his fingers working into the soft weave of his hat.

 

Fangs settled a quick hand on his, then turned as Vivian pushed a limping James into the passenger seat. “Where’s Claire?”

 

“Helping Red cart that gargoyle Kurtz to the Sheriff,” She answered, Jughead could barely hear her over the roar in his ears, like she was yelling from far away, “Everyone’s out, I think… What’s up with bossman?” Jughead twitched, staring at the flatbed beneath him.

 

Fangs faltered and Sweet Pea barked, “Just drive, Vivian.”

 

Vivian hissed at him, but climbed into the cab anyway.

 

For a while, they stared at the road and it rolled by behind them, the only light coming from the cab and the rear headlights. The air was cold and smelled like rain, and Sweet Pea wrung his hands with a fervent, anxious, energy, his leg bouncing until Fangs giggled numbly into the night.

 

“What?” Sweet Pea’s voice was hoarse.

 

Fangs smiled. “I don’t know,” He kept laughing.

 

Jughead let his last tear fall and said: “I fell out of a two story window.” His voice was devoid of emotion, his body finally empty like an old cardboard box in a dusty attic, making room for more of what was to come. More cults and G&G, more Riverdale to take up space in his shaking form. Fangs’ shoulders shook with mirth, Sweet Pea had made himself still as a rock.

 

“It was an ascension.”

 

“No, don’t even think that,” Sweet Pea shook his head, “That motherfucker was trying to _kill you.”_

 

Jughead stared at his palms, feeling that foundation deep inside him once again. The solid feeling that had formed in the broken aftermath of the fall. “He still called it an ascension.”

 

“The Farm has an ascension thing too,” Fangs said, his smile curved in all the wrong ways. “I joined a _cult_ to get a boyfriend-” He snorted, but he reached to cover his face, “-I hate wearing white.”

 

Sweet Pea picked at the dirt under his fingernails and nodded, when he spoke, Jughead had to struggle to hear him, sleep tugging at his eyes.

 

“I thought I was in love with Josie,” He said, “...Didn’t really pan out.” He sighed and rested his head on the cab, looking empty and no longer shaking.

 

Jughead leaned to rest his head on Fangs’ shoulder, letting the fall, his ascension, play out over and over behind his eyes. He let himself go limp, closing his eyes just he hit the ground for the hundredth time. His back ached and his ribs shifted under his skin, bruises and cuts finally making themselves known after the adrenaline faded.

 

“I’m so tired.”

 

Fangs hummed, resting his cheek on Jughead’s head. “Yeah.”

 

In his dream, Jughead stared at his reflection in a broken mirror, gnarled antlers growing from his forehead. From his blue lips dripped froth and spit, until the mirror exploded into glass, morphing into the window and the wood. His antlers heavy on his head, Kurtz grabbed hold and pushed him back around, another fall, another ascension.

 

He was awake just before his body could shatter on the ground below.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Hey come yell at me, my riverdale blog is @serpentstrength and my main is @sangrientojoe
> 
> also this whole fic was me just going ape on how good Jughead's character could be if they moved away from this whole gang leader/super sleuth angle and instead addressed how he's a traumatized, anxious teen prone to fits of obsession and anger (and also let him make out with Archie yk) Just like how Archie is a depressed traumatized sweetheart but we ALL know the writers of this show aren't that good so whoops guess that's my job now!!


End file.
